Leveling Bear Druids in 4.0.1Follow

Just tell people to single target one add down before they aoe. Swipe may not be spammable, but it hits pretty hard, so it's not all that bad.

Blizzard screwed up Bear tanking enough to make me essentially not play anymore. Tanking is what I did and now it's horrible. Really, really horrible. It's not so much the lack of spammable Swipe, but more that you can't get any initial AOE in before the DPS or healer pulls aggro. Death Knights can still throw down Death & Decay or a Blood Boil. Paladins still have Consecrate. Warrior are sort of in the same boat, except their Shockwave is raping the face off my Swipe.

Druid tanking should get better at level 81 when we get Thrash, but to put us in this position for 80 levels is just a slap in the face. What, were Druids too good at AOE tanking? Compared to Paladins and Death Knights? Really? I mean, most Druid tanks I know were complaining about Swipe not being enough to hold aggro against stuff, so their reply to this concern was to nerf Swipe?

The logic... I don't see it.

Kitty DPS was hurt a bit with the lack of expertise from talents, but it's not that bad. In full PvP gear (stam gems and survivability trinkets) I still pushed 3k DPS in Culling of Stratholme, getting as high as 8k DPS on Mal'Ganis.

If I had 3k gold, I'd totally regem/talent/glyph to DPS and go rape some stuff. Right now I'm desperately trying to farm enough Honor for a PvP weapon. Only 1k to go.

Random BG seems to be SotA all the time and Horde fails miserably there on my server.

Once you're running, it's not hard, no. Whenever you have to stop and then pull a group at 0 rage... that's bad. Didn't help that my first time tanking with the new patch was in Trial of the Champion. Group pull upon group pull with rage-dumping pauses every time. I'd move towards one group, pull with Feral Faerie Fire, reach the group, use Demoralizing Roar, Swipe, get a heal from the healer and instantly lose aggro to everyone.

And it's not like I'm wearing bad gear or anything. I tanked most of ICC25 and my average item level in my tanking gear is 265. It just gets me every time. I pull a group and before I can secure aggro, I lose it. Not being able to spam Swipe was just lol in Pit of Saron. The bit where you have to run through the tunnel and pick up mobs on the go. Usually I'd run and spam Swipe, but with Swipe on a cooldown and Demoralizing Roar being pathetic TPS, I lost aggro to everyone. Eventually I just pulled two at a time and slowly chewed my way through it.

At least everyone has 30k+ health now, before buffs.

The worst part is the near worthlessness of tab targeting in many five mans. It doesn't always cycle through all the mobs and often goes to ones not in range.

The health bars are also fairly clunky and I'm going to get Tiny Plates up and running in the next day or so to see if they help.

The lack of focus firing by DPS is a huge problem now. They are not used to it any more. Since nothing can seriously kill them in five mans these days they have no reason to bother. Hopefully Thrash and Cata will change this but seriously level 81 for Thrash? Like seriously?

To be honest, I enjoy tanking on my druid more so now than ever before. Yes, swipe has a CD- but it does MASSIVE damage, I am often up above 9k dps while tanking in ICC on trash pulls, and I have no problem keeping agro. Our main tank group for ICC10 is prot warrior and me (bear) and he is just as geared as I am, both have 264 weapons and most armor is 264. My dps is on average 2k higher than his on trash, and usually 1500 more than his on boss fights. I find my single target dps is insane also. Also- I very rarely use Demoralizing roar more than the initial pull to get the group all grouped together. After I rush in with FFF and Demoralizing roar, I use Swipe whenever off CD, then use mangle/maul as long as rage is building up enough.

There are no aggro reducing talents any more.